


After the Fire

by Evandar



Series: Painless [6]
Category: The Hobbit - All Media Types, The Lord of the Rings - All Media Types
Genre: Angst, Depression, Dysfunctional Family, Family Secrets, Gen, Implied Slash, Lack of Communication, awkward reunion, implied child neglect
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-02-13
Updated: 2015-02-13
Packaged: 2018-03-12 03:38:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,287
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3342140
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Evandar/pseuds/Evandar
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Eleven months after the fall of Sauron, Legolas finally returns home with a Dwarf in tow. Thranduil begins to realise just how much Legolas hides from him.</p>
            </blockquote>





	After the Fire

**Author's Note:**

> This has been half-written for the last, oh, year? But I finally got my butt kicked hard enough to finish it, so many thanks for that go to Lynndyre and Sharkseye.

Like the dragon, the forces of Sauron have reduced the fields and farms of the north to little more than ash and rubble. This time, however, the fires have spread even to the Woodland Realm, and trees he has seen sprout strong and tall from nut and acorn are now little more than charcoal. His Silvan people drift in these new clearings – pale-faced and soot-stained – and their laments echo in his mind.

Thranduil has seen kingdoms fall before. He has seen monsters tread sacred paths through glade and meadow, sacking and burning, and he remembers Doriath’s fall as clearly as Mirkwood’s. It would be so easy, he thinks to himself, to do as Melian did when her enchantments were broken as his now are; to sail west to Valinor with what remains of his people.

He knows he will not. There is no seaward pull for him and never has been. He has borne tragedy after tragedy and never broken – not entirely – and he knows that he will never forgive himself for leaving his people. He didn’t leave after Mordor and the birth of his son; he cannot leave now.

Still, he finds himself looking westward each day, searching the horizon. It’s not distant shores he looks for like the whispers say – and he does hear them – but Legolas, whose lengthening absence is slowly, surely filling him with dread.

…

_“This is all magic is: force of will and faith in the One. If you can muster them and hold them fierce in your heart without despair, then the magic of the world is yours to command. But if you should falter or fade, Thranduil Oropherion, then it will twist in your mind until ‘tis unrecognisable.”_

The waters of the river soak through his robes and bite cold into his skin. There was a babe in his belly, the last time he did this; kicking cruelly as if it felt the chill. As if it felt at all, his Orcling. He shakes his head and lowers his fingertips to the water.

His people need protecting.

Elves are fleeing Arda in droves. Lorien is emptying of its people; Rivendell is near abandoned. Their time in this world is over, and yet his Silvan people have no wish to leave. Their place is with the trees and Thranduil’s place is with them. He knows it. He can feel it. There is no white ship for him. 

There is no white ship for Legolas.

He refuses to think that Legolas might be dead. The reasons that stayed his hand when Legolas was newly born still linger in his mind, and memories of the bright and brilliant Elfling Legolas had been before Thranduil had seen the Orc in him and _remembered_ are tearing at the sinews of Thranduil’s very being. His heart beats in time with Legolas’ name, and it is a thought of him – of a twilight kingdom where they can heal together, surrounded by the last of their kin – that pulls magic from his form and reawakens the enchantment on the river.

It is, perhaps, not quite what Queen Melian had once taught him. His force of will has ever been indomitable: he has survived where other Elves have faded or fled. His faith is that he is forsaken.

…

His halls are empty when Legolas finally arrives. He has sent his people out to the burnt fields surrounding Esgaroth and Dale, and together with the Men they are beginning to return life to the north.

Life always finds a way. In the blackened husk of many a burned-out tree trunk, seedlings are beginning to sprout. 

He is tending to some of those seedlings when his son appears at last, riding a pale grey horse with a Dwarf at his back. They are silent. The expression on his son’s face is, briefly, one of sorrow; when he notices Thranduil watching him, that sorrow vanishes behind something cold and implacable. It’s the way he remembers his son, this blank, alien creature, and his heart clenches in his chest. For a moment – in that split second where feeling had shown on Legolas’ face – he had looked so very like Oropher.

Thranduil has never seen any resemblance between his father and Legolas before. He has never looked for it.

Legolas dismounts. His gaze tracks over the clearing, the decimated oak by which Thranduil knelt and the delicate saplings cradled in its charred trunk; the carpet of ash where there was once loam. Not once, Thranduil notices, does Legolas look directly at him.

It’s familiar. Too familiar. But it is freshly painful. Thranduil wants to reach for him, but the words stick in his throat and he looks away from his son only for his gaze to land on the Dwarf instead.

…

The Dwarves of Erebor are a hard and hearty folk. Those who lived in the mountain before the dragon were rich and spoiled, but the people of Dain – of Thorin Stonehelm, now – have known true hardship. The Dwarf that Legolas has returned with, he learns, is the son of Gloin. The son of one of Oakenshield’s company. He is a child of the Blue Mountains, far to the west, removed to Erebor when he was just a child; he is brave and strong, in the words of Legolas, but what his son doesn’t say – though Thranduil sees it – is that Gimli Gloin’s-son is utterly _devoted_ to him.

He sees it, but says nothing. As always, he says _nothing_ while Legolas tells of his travels to a place somewhere over Thranduil’s shoulder as they dine, pausing only to take sips of wine and tiny slivers of food. He is careful, Thranduil notices, never to show his teeth by smiling too widely or taking too large a bite.

He spends the meal studying the things that Legolas does not do. Legolas does not smile or laugh, or even glance at his companion overly much save in those parts where he talks about him; he glosses over the horrors of his travels – Thranduil does not care to look far beyond his borders, but he knows of Durin’s Bane and what Legolas must have seen in those mine – and speaks not of fear or pain. _(What does he know of pain?)_ Legolas does not speak of his achievements, or of the sea, or overly much of anything save the bravery of the Fellowship and the fall of Sauron, and yet he manages somehow to make his tale last almost the full length of the feast.

Then, as plates of berries and cream and delicate cakes are brought in, Thranduil finds his voice. “Sauron fell almost eleven months past,” he says. “What have you done in the time between then and now?”

Legolas’ gaze flickers briefly to his companion. “We stayed in Minas Tirith,” he says, “while Aragorn was crowned King Elessar and while our companions healed.” He draws his spoon through his cream aimlessly, twisting it between his fingers. “We helped with the rebuilding of the city, with planting gardens, and we – we then travelled north, to the glittering caves of Aglarond beneath the fortress of Helm’s Deep and then to Fangorn. There was – we made a promise to one another to see those places should we both survive.”

Any anger he might have felt, any fury over Legolas’ obvious procrastination, fled, leaving only the cold grey of his grief behind. That Legolas could have died…

That he even cared to return at all. Thranduil’s stomach twists. He cannot imagine that he has inspired much in the way of filial loyalty in this being he barely knows. But Legolas is here, alive, breathing, and _here_ in his halls once more.

It must mean something.

It has to.


End file.
